[4.] For an account of the horrors associated with childbirth, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 79-80.
[5.] See ARS 216, x, n. 12. Professor Guffey offers parallels between The Merry-Thought and Hurlothrumbo in “Graffiti, Hurlo Thrumbo, and the Other Samuel Johnson,” Forum: A Journal of the Humanities and Fine Arts 17 (1979): 35-47.
[6.] Michael Treadwell has demonstrated that the “trade publishers” of the eighteenth century, such as James Roberts, acted almost exclusively as binders and distributors of books and were therefore different in kind from the printers and booksellers, who were directly involved in the selection and production process. Roberts and the other “trade publishers” dealt almost exclusively in “works belonging to others,” and Treadwell singles out Roberts as the purest example. Despite putting his name to “literally thousands of works,” he never purchased any of the copyrights on works during his long career. See “London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750,” Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 99-134.
[7.] See Martin Pops, “The Metamorphosis of Shit,” Salmagundi 56 (1982): 27-61.
[8.] Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, in Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 54.
[9.] Without suggesting that Blake may have known of Johnson’s work, I would nevertheless note the similarity of certain sections. Like Blake, Johnson mingled comedy and satire in his vision.
[10.] Compare Blake’s “The Mental Traveler,” The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman and Harold Bloom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 476-77.
[11.] See Pops, 31.
[12.] Blake, Poetry and Prose, 491.
[13.] The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 35.